Poker is a card game in which players wager money on the outcome of a hand. While poker is often seen as a game of chance, it also requires a great deal of skill and strategy. The game has many variants, but they all have a few things in common.
In the game, players place an initial amount of money into the pot before the cards are dealt. This is called the ante. Players can also be forced to put in more money during the betting rounds by a bring-in or blind bet.
A player who has the best poker hand wins the pot. Ties are broken by the highest unmatched cards (for example, two pairs in a full house). The suits have no rank, but a straight beats any other poker hand if it contains five consecutive cards of different ranks in one suit.
Professional poker players make use of a variety of information to exploit opponents and protect themselves from them. These include cues from eye contact and body language, electronic records of other players’ bets, and even betting histories. They are experts at extracting signal from noise and integrating this information into their decision-making. These tactics are especially important when playing online, where in-person knowledge is impossible. The 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern used poker as a central example to demonstrate how optimal strategies could be developed.